In case anyone wants a contemporary view, here is C.S. Lewis’s review of The Fellowship of the Ring. (Full disclosure: Tolkien and Lewis were friends and fellow members of the fantasy-aficionado informal club Inklings, so naturally Lewis wasn’t going to pan Tolkien’s work, but AFAICT it’s quite a sincere assessment.)
I’m missing the Bestiary.
The Lord of the Rings is also the foundational work for the Fantasy Genre. There were others before it, but LoTR made it a stand-alone genre instead of a small part of the Sci-Fi section.
This is absolutely true, and fantasy fans who aren’t Tolkien fans will, I hope, at least appreciate him for this.
I reread the books a few years back as a read-aloud to my daughter, and things I noticed:
- That professor is a professor, and his characters often slip into professorial mode. “Why Frodo!” Gandalf will say, “I must tell you about the history of the elves!” and fourteen monologuing pages later I’m like motherfucker will you shut up? “Pippin!” Aragorn says, “Now we walk by the River Anduin, but would you like to hear about the name’s history, and then what the dwarves call it, and then the history of the dwarve’s name for the river, and then what the Race of Men call it?” and Pippin just takes some extra puffs of pipeweed and I envy Pippin. I eventually suggested, and my daughter enthusiastically agreed, that we could summarize some of the monologues.
- It might be a fantasy world, but the culture is 100% 20th-century Oxford. Specifically, the Samwise-Frodo relationship is, to my modern eyes, deeply messed up. Again, I suggested a change to my daughter: I just couldn’t read Samwise calling Frodo “Master” any more. I tried some different things to make it more accurate to my sensibilities, but “Sweetie,” “Pumpkin,” and “Honey” just didn’t stick. Eventually I replaced Sam’s “Master” with “My friend,” and that worked.
- Holy mother of God can that man write an action scene! When the professors quit lecturing and the spider legs (or orc spears or lava flows) come out, hold onto your hat! The climax is maybe the most exciting scene I’ve ever read, with three or four “Holy shit!” twists in the span of two pages. He’s damn near peerless in this regard.
- The emotions of the book ring really true, and at least some of his characters are complex and rounded in a way that his fantasy contemporaries rarely achieved. Gollum is one of the great villains of literature, up there with Long John Silver (although very different). And did I say Sam and Frodo’s relationship is messed up? I stand by that, but it’s also one of the great male friendships in literature and makes me cry. Frodo’s aftermath from adventure is realer than most novels in the real world.
Is it my favorite? I don’t think so. I love Le Guin more, and NK Jemisin thrills me in a way that Tolkien doesn’t, and Peter Beagle’s language takes my breath away in a way that Tolkien doesn’t, and Sandman and The Count of Monte Cristo and Perdido Street Station and Black Leopard, Red Wolf are all better IMO. But it’s a monumental work, and it absolutely has enough pure joy in it to make all the exposition-dumps tolerable.
Did you start with “The Hobbit” with your daughter? If so, did she like that better?
That’s exactly when I gave up. I realized I had just read several pages and didn’t understand what was going on, or who all these people were.
Admittedly, I started with a disadvantage: I hate fantasy. Everyone said it was so good, I decided to try to read it, even though it is fantasy. Nope, not for me.
Long before I stopped reading, I stopped reading Lord of the Rings. I bought Fellowship of the Ring almost twenty years ago (it was the summer of '04 when USS Enterprise pulled into Portsmouth, England around the Fourth of July and I needed a couple books to get me through the rest of my time onboard). I finished Catch-22 in short order, but I have been stuck on the last 50 pages of LotR: FotR for almost 20 years. Just don’t care to finish it because it’s not that interesting to me.
By contrast, I didn’t stop reading for fun until 2012 (Iraq really did a number on me, and A Bright Shining Lie was the book that pushed me over the edge: read it all the way through in a flurry not long after I got back from Iraq, and then no more). Point being, I used to read, but damned if I could get through even the first book in the LotR trilogy. So I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with the OP. Respectfully.
No, I mentioned it in some posts, I think. I know Carl Hostetter. I also know Verlyn Fleiger, who has edited other Tolkien works. Fleiger was the scholar guest of honor at a Mythcon in 1994. Hostetter was on the convention organizing committee. And I, um, was the chair of the committee. Not because I know any more about Tolkien, because I certainly don’t, but because it was my idea for us to do the Mythcon in our area that year.
I have to say I’m quite surprised by how many people couldn’t get through it or finish LOTR! I thought that would be very rare. I guess I can understand if I think about the difficulty I had trying to get through The Silmarillion the first time as a teenager. When I gave it a shot as an adult I couldn’t believe that it had been such a slog the first time because it instantly became one of my all time favourites.
But I am very much enjoying the conversation!
I won’t rate Tolkien’s works among all fiction ever written, because I haven’t read enough of other sorts of fiction. I rate The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (as a unit) as the second best fantasy long works (i.e., over 25,000 words). Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (as a unit) I rate as being the best fantasy long works ever.
BOTR is to LOTR as Galaxy Quest is to Star Trek. They each help complete and fulfill their respective universes.
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Watusi snarf wazoo
Nixon Dirksen nasahist
Rebozo boogaloo!
I read LotR for the 1st time shortly before the 1st film came out; while I appreciated the world-building and such and found the timeless “aura” he evoked rather appealing, the pace (as indicated upthread) was highly uneven. Note I came into it as a fairly inveterate fantasy reader, so a lot of the tropes involved that JRRT himself came up with (to his credit to be sure) were substantially refined by later authors so I found a lot of the goings-on to be a bit hackneyed. I tried again c. 6 years ago, and couldn’t get through more than 50 pages of Fellowship. I think the frequent breaks into song regularly threw me completely out of the story; PJ was sparing in their use in the films, to his credit.
I had a very hard time getting through The Hobbit, and that’s intended for children! Just not on my wavelength at all.
Did you watch any of the Peter Jackson movies? If so, did you like those?
Yes, but do you have a first edition Cliff’s Notes for The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit? I do. 
I absolutely loved the LOTR movies. The very first scene of Hobbiton gave me a lump in my throat because it was just like I’d pictured for so long. I (mostly) didn’t mind the changes they made from the books with the exception of the change in Faramir’s personality which I really disliked. The movies are amongst my all time favourites.
The Hobbit movie was so disappointing as to be almost unwatchable for me. I did eventually see all parts but I hated all the changes from the book. It’s just sort of loosely based on The Hobbit.
I saw the first one. Didn’t really like it. Never saw the other two.
That reminds me of the proverbial dear old theatergoer who remarked, after seeing Hamlet for the first time, that it was “so full of quotations”. 
I first read “The Lord of the Rings” when I was 14 & loved it, Tolkien’s world building wizardry and all the colorful characters, Elves, Hobbits and Men alike [plus one Dwarf!]. I feel being younger & more impressionable is 1reason it made such an impact on me, plus the fact that I’d never read any other fantasy tales before LOTR. Might be a reason we have such a variety of responses here too → it hits you at a different angle if you read it when you’re younger. Yet the 6 or 7 times I’ve read it since then have always been an enjoyable journey, though I understand the slog some of Tolkien’s passages can be.
A coincidental aside - I’m working a job writing responses to Large Language Models, aka A.I. and my task today was to recommend and summarize a book. I sure as hell wasn’t going to attempt LOTR so what did I choose instead? “The Silmarillion”, Tolkien’s vast but single volume creation myth. And, like magic, a new Tolkien thread appears here 
!
Also, I agree with mbhCharter Member’s insightful note above: “The Silmarillion” IS quite a different beast from LOTR & the Hobbit & I understood it better by reading those tales first.
Hee, I was blown away by that scene because I hadn’t ever pictured Hobbiton—I’m really bad at creating imaginary visuals to go with my readings of narrative, always have been—and all of a sudden there it was! 
Yes, it was mostly just like the book descriptions, but I’d never been able to see it before. Like the first time you get glasses as a myopic kid, or something: this whole world just sprang to life.
Yeah that very first scene was such a memorable experience! There’s Hobbiton!